A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter D

Distillation

Craft Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Distillation is the reduction of abundant material until its most potent meanings and sensations remain.

Detailed Definition
A poet distills by removing plot, explanation, ornament, or context while preserving the pressure that made the draft necessary. The process resembles concentrating a liquid: fewer words carry a stronger flavor, but the poem must not become so reduced that it loses body. Distillation is valuable in lyric revision and in adapting prose notes into verse. The poet tests each omission by asking whether the reader can still feel the source through the concentrated residue.
Example
Example in poetry:
Distillation removes excess detail until a poem presents only the essential image, as in a brief haiku about one frog, one pond, and one sound; A poet may revise a long account of a funeral into the distilled statement “her coat still holds the shape of goodbye”; Emily Dickinson’s compressed syntax often distills large ideas about death, faith, and identity into a few startling lines; Replacing explanation with the single image of an unopened letter can distill a speaker’s regret
Additional Notes
Distillation is the careful reduction of a draft or body of material until its strongest images, sounds, and implications remain. Cutting repetition, explanation, weak modifiers, and predictable phrasing can increase intensity without making a poem emotionally thin. Distillation does not always mean brevity; a long poem may be distilled through concentrated scenes and purposeful transitions. Read each line aloud and ask whether it adds pressure, texture, knowledge, or surprise. Related practices include compression, revision, economy, and the use of concrete detail.
Also Known As
Refinement Concentration
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